There is a joke that everyone hits a certain age and suddenly gets in to birdwatching.  Well, I’ve always been in to birdwatching!*  So instead I’ve hit a certain age and suddenly gotten very in to canning and preserving.  Or at least, very in to it for about 6 weeks a year.

Last year I made lots of apple butter.  I was really looking forward to making it again this year, and started monitoring the tree in anticipation through Dec and Jan and Feb.

And then just a few weeks before the apples were properly ripe, Wellington got hit by a Southerly Storm.   (the caps are well deserved).  I’ve lived in the windiest city in the world for two decades, and been through a couple of hurricanes in Hawai’i (admittedly not on the island that got the brunt of them), and this is the first time in my life I was worried about my safety inside a house during the storm.

I got off mildly with a knocked down fence and a couple of broken tree branches to clear up.  Others sustained far worse.

Every leaf with southern exposure got stripped from the trees across the city, and anyone with an unprotected fruit tree lost their crop.  Every single apple got wretched off the tree and rolled down the hill into the underbrush.  I managed to collect a bag of windfall apples and make a small batch of apple butter, but nothing compared to last year.

But that’s OK, because I had already discovered a new foraged fruit fixation: blackberries!

There are wild blackberry bushes all over the Wellington region.  They are an invasive pest, and rather a nightmare because they form impenetrable thorny thickets.  But they do make lots of lovely fruit in summer.  I’m not that fond of eating them straight, but they make gorgeous jam.

I had lots of hot, sticky fun staining my hands purple and getting all scratched up picking punnets and punnets of blackberries and turning them into jam.

I discovered that a walking stick with a crooked handle was the perfect tool for holding nasty bramble whips aside to reach a particularly juicy berry.  And that kitchen tongs are great for picking and protecting your hands.

No particular recipe to my jam: just blackberries and sugar and lemon juice for pectin.

I made tons and tons of jam, or so I thought…

I gave jars of it away, and gobbled it up on toast, and had grand dreams of all out jam for our historical retreat this year being homemade because I’d made SO much jam.

Alas, it was too delicious, and by early May I had only one tiny jar left!

So what does that mean?  That means that next year I need to make LOTS more!

 

*Seriously.  I literally took ‘Birdwatching 101’ in university to fulfil my science requirement.  And yes, I learned a lot of actual science in it!